The voices, bright and laughing, cut through the silence I’ve found myself in.
I spin, heart lurching, and then freeze.
Because the girl prancing into the cabin is me.
Not the woman I am now, but the girl I was years ago. Softer. Lighter. Pink-cheeked, hair long and left to do whatever the hell it wants, energy seemingly boundless. She isn’t bracing for the next blow or the next loss. She doesn’t yet know how fast life can change, or how violently and eagerly it can steal from you.
She’s clutching a crudely wrapped gift in her hands, holding it like it’s the most important thing in the world. The brown paper is wrinkled from being handled too many times, the string tied in a knot that looks like it was done quickly and then redone, as if whoever wrapped it cared more than they wanted to admit.
And right behind her—behindme—is Rennick.
The younger, less burdened version of my mate. The one I left back in the nest before we were both swallowed whole by Mom’s magic. I can’t recall much of what happened before I landed here, the pieces hazy and disjointed, but the threads snaking around us…that much I remember.
He moves through the cabin with this confident, unaffected swagger that I almost believe to be genuine. Right up until his gray gaze lock on her—onme—and everything in him seems to shift. It’s a subtle, quiet rearranging, as she smiles back at him. His eyes soften and he draws closer, as if pulled by a force he can’t put a name to yet but also can’t ignore. He stares at her like he’s found the thing to center his universe around.
I know that look. It’s mine and very much real. It’s the same one he gives me now. The same quiet but intense devotion that makes my skin heat and my heart soar. And now I know he’s always looked at me like this. I just didn’t know it. No, I didn’t remember.
Swallowing a rising knot of emotion, my eyes flicker around the room in a fast, searching sweep, and that’s when I see them.
Green and white balloons are tied to the chairs around the small kitchen table. The ones Mom drove all the way to Silverthorne to get the week of my birthday. Between their familiar presence and the brown, wrinkled paper of the gift, recognition starts to itch at the edges of my mind.
The memories don’t arrive neatly, but in uneven flashes, out of order and driven more by emotion than by sharp detail. What’s unfolding in front of me, it’s real—an echo of something that already happened playing itself back.
It’s the day before my eighteenth birthday.
I remember how tightly I’d been wound that day, bursting with so much anticipation, I feared I might come apart at the seams. There’s a hint of the same restlessness in my chest now, as if proximity alone allows it to transfer. Eighteenth birthdaysare important for shifters. It’s on or around that milestone that our wolves emerge and we shift for the first time.
The younger me finally tears into the paper wrapping the gift, too excited to do it neatly. It rips with a satisfying, messy sound. The package opens and she pulls out an antique leather-bound book, the cover worn, the corners frayed from years of use. When she opens it, the pages are decorated with drawings, handwritten notes scrawled in the margins, and drying flowers already pressed between chapters.
My breath leaves me in a shaky exhale. I know that book. I still have it.
It sits on a bookshelf back in my room in Ashvale, looking even more well-loved than it does now. I always thought it was just something that’s been mine forever, one of the few lucky items that made the cut when Mom and I ran from here.
All this time it was a gift from Rennick.
The other Noa makes a sound of pure delight, turns, and doesn’t hesitate a second before she winds her arm around Rennick’s middle. With the book clutched tightly to her own chest, she rests her head against the solid expanse of his. He clutches her close instantly. Whatever they say to each other is lost to me, leaving only the way he stares down at her.
His expression changes again, becoming the same faint disbelief I’ve caught him wearing in the real world. The look he gets when he watches me as if he still can’t quite accept that I’m real. That I exist.
I can’t look away and for a moment, I just stand there, held hostage by the sweetness of the whole thing. By the proof of what we were, or what we were on our way to being, before everything was sabotaged.
“He already knew you were his at this point. And you were starting to feel it too, even if you hadn’t admitted it to him. Or yourself.”
The voice comes from behind me. Crisp, real, and familiar in a way that makes my heart lurch. I pivot toward it, fast enough to make my bare feet slide on the wooden floors.
Breath caught in my throat, I come face to face with the owner.
My mom stands there waiting for me. In the other dreams, she’d looked younger, stuck in the past, but not this time. She looks exactly as she did the last time I saw her alive and breathing in the real world. Her dark hair, so much like mine, is loose around her shoulders with silver threaded through her temples. The lines around her eyes and mouth earned and deep. Evidence of a life lived.
She’s so close. Closer than she’s ever been in one of these memories.
I’m stepping toward her before I can remember why I shouldn’t. This has never worked out well for me before. I’ve always been met with resistance, an invisible force intent on keeping me out of reach. It doesn’t come now.
Instead, it’s Mom who closes the distance completely and makes the first contact. Her fingertips glide along my face, warm and solid, tracing the line from cheekbone to chin before she cups it, giving it that familiar little pinch. The very one she’s done my whole life. She’s real. As real as she can be in my subconscious, that is.
“Mom?” The word tears out of me on a strangled exhale.
Her smile is sad and gentle all at once. “You did it then,” she murmurs. “You found your way back to him?”
